In retrospect, the 2018 Eagles were not ready to come roaring out of the starting blocks, with Carson Wentz unable to enter the fray until Week 3, and other key pieces either starting the season with no real preseason work or still sidelined by injuries sustained during the Super Bowl run.
Maybe that should have been clearer to all of us, but, well, they'd won the Super Bowl with Nick Foles, and key players were sidelined along the way last season, and none of it seemed to make a difference in that magical playoff month.
Maybe we failed to grasp the real meaning of the word "unique."
At any rate, Eagles coach Doug Pederson grasped the NovaCare lectern Monday and took his best shot at making sense of his team's bumbling, stumbling 2-3 start. In Sunday's 23-21 home loss to the Minnesota Vikings, the Eagles did not seem to be at a talent disadvantage, any more than they had the week before in losing 26-23 in overtime at Tennessee.
What they seemed to be was hard to label _ whatever the opposite of opportunistic is, that was it. They were a team that made everything harder than it needed to be. (Third-and-1 misdirection to set up a pitch to rookie running back Josh Adams, rather than just have Wentz burrow forward on a sneak?)
They were again a team that made some really nice plays near the end of the game, trying to dig out of a hole they'd dug, largely by taking penalties, tackling poorly and giving the ball away at the worst times.
Pederson was asked about Wentz's postgame observation, that "we're playing like we're a young, rookie team and we're not. ... I kind of feel like that's where we were two years ago _ we were that young team making these mistakes and kind of having those ebbs and flows. Last year you didn't see a lot of that. The veteran team we have, I'm confident we're going to fix it and turn it around, but it's frustrating right now."
"You can appreciate it," Pederson said. "It feels that way, because of the mistakes that we're making. I saw his comment. Mentioned that we're a veteran team making rookie mistakes. Those are the things that I've been talking about with you guys, the players have been talking about it. ... Like I told the team at the end of the game in the locker room, championship teams can't make these mistakes and expect to win.
"That's where we are. ... There is a sense of urgency obviously to get better, to fix it. We're on a short week this week, but our guys are professionals and they'll get it done."
Get it done by Thursday's visit to the Giants? That would be nice, but cohesion doesn't just happen, especially in a short week with very little real practice. Reality right now is 36-year-old, nine-time Pro Bowl left tackle Jason Peters limping around on a bad quad, leaving Sunday's game briefly for treatment and seeing his replacement, Halapoulivaati Vaitai, give up a sack that helped force the Eagles to settle for a third-quarter field goal on a promising drive.
Reality also is Jay Ajayi abruptly going on injured reserve Monday with a torn ACL, leaving Adams and Wendell Smallwood as the team's only healthy running backs.
"No, this is a different team. Last year was last year," Peters said afterward. "We lost guys in free agency and we have a quarterback coming off of an injury, I'm coming off an injury, and [Darren] Sproles [who hasn't played since the opener] is coming off of an injury. It's a different team, and we're just shooting ourselves in the foot right now."
Alshon Jeffery, in his second start of the season following shoulder surgery, had a tough outing against Xavier Rhodes (eight targets, two catches), and took one of the Eagles' two illegal-formation penalties, failing to toe the line of scrimmage.
"We're starting to get guys healthy, but there's always a setback. Someone gets dinged up, he misses a game," Pederson said, when asked about Super Bowl aftereffects, such as fatigue or burnout.
He said his players are battling through, but "right now it's not just carrying over enough into the games. The energy level is enough, the effort is there. We're just self-inflicting ourselves with explosive plays on defense, penalties, whether it be in the secondary or on offense. That's not fatigue, that's not burnout. That's just concentration on the task at hand."
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